Captcha Thief (Amy Lane Mysteries) (15 page)

After Cerys awkwardly explained that she was just a go-between, the girl insisted on speaking with Amy by phone. Cerys handed over her own mobile and the girl ducked her face away, from Cerys and the camera.

‘How did you get this number?’

She was pissed off, and perhaps a little afraid. Amy didn’t want to come across as a creepy stalker, but if she had to lose face to solve this murder, she was prepared to take the risk.

‘I found your picture on your friend’s Instagram account and asked her to meet you.’

‘She’s not my friend. We only met a few days ago. Why are you following me?’

Amy decided to bluff. ‘Confirm your forum handle. I need to know I can trust you.’

‘Corelia. Who are you? What’s this all about?’

Amy had a vague idea what geocaching was – hide a thing, leave clues, someone finds it – but she needed more. She searched for local geocaching groups, finding the Cardiff Geocaching Forum and quickly searching for Corelia’s posts as she kept her talking. ‘What’s going on at the museum?’

Corelia turned back to the camera for a moment, a smug smile spreading across her face. ‘You want my help with the clue.’

The posts appeared on her screen. All Corelia’s latest contributions had been centred around her frustrations with the Welsh cache in the UK Treasure Hunt.

‘Yes,’ Amy said, distractedly, trying to skim through the information. ‘I’m … I’m Ada, and we can help each other.’

‘And who are you then? Her sidekick?’

As Cerys tried to field Corelia’s questions, Amy looked into the UK Treasure Hunt. It appeared to be a national competition, with fifty separate caches spread around the country. The UK Treasure Hunt required cache hunters to prove their find by inputting a ten-digit code. This might be scrawled on a piece of paper, embossed on an item, or loaded on a chip that needed scanning. The first person to find all fifty caches could claim a ridiculous prize of £100,000, with smaller prizes for the ‘first finder’ of each cache. If Amy wasn’t sitting on a stolen fortune, she’d be tempted to try her luck.

The forum thread was nearing one hundred replies, as everyone complained it was too hard and begging a user called ‘LizzieSiddal’ for a clue, someone who sounded like a very experienced geocacher. Why was that name familiar?

‘Oi, are you listening?’

Amy tuned back in, concentrating again on the phone conversation.

‘I think we can solve it if we work together,’ Amy said.

She brought up the Welsh cache’s details. The starting location was definitely on the edge of Park Place and the museum the most likely building. The page counter stated it was yet to be solved, one of only two in the competition.

Amy studied the riddle with her mystery-solving eye:

Yesterday was St Valentine

Water, for anguish of the solstice: —nay

Oh! May sits crowned with hawthorn-flower

And day and night yield one delight once more?

‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ Jason said, peering over her shoulder.

Yet something about the words nagged at the back of her brain. She had read some of them before, but where?

‘Isn’t that cheating?’ Corelia said suspiciously.

‘There are forty-nine other clues,’ Amy reasoned. ‘Collaborating on one won’t hurt. And you can have first find.’

The coveted position and prize of ‘first find’ seemed to sway it for Corelia. ‘All right. Though I’ve searched the galleries every day for the past week and found nothing. And now they’re bloody well closed.’

‘Talk me through your reasoning so far,’ Amy said, hoping Corelia wouldn’t catch on that this partnership was rather one-sided.

‘Well.’ Corelia pulled out her phone, scrolling through some notes. ‘Everyone’s arguing over whether the lines should be taken literal, or if they’re symbolic. Or maybe there’s a code in it. Me personally? I reckon it’s hid by a Rossetti painting – they’re his poems, after all.’

Rossetti.
The artist behind the flame-haired woman. Amy pasted the lines into a plagiarism analyser she’d been tinkering with last summer, a project for an exasperated professor of theology, and let AEON cross-reference it to common sources. She identified the poems in seconds, spitting out the titles for Amy’s perusal.

‘The first one references her handle,’ Amy said, referring to ‘Valentine – For Lizzie Siddal.’ ‘Maybe the choice was vanity.’

‘Then why not Siddal’s poems? That first line is the best evidence there is for a code – the fifteenth of February, or one-five-oh-two, one-five-two, something like that. It could be a catalogue reference.’

‘Why all the interest in
La Parisienne
?’ Amy said.

The concentration of suspicious persons had been around that painting – now most likely to be other geocachers. Amy belatedly recalled that she was meant to be solving a murder, not a geocache. Though perhaps the two were connected?

Corelia, however, laughed at the question. ‘Some idiots think that the water in line two must refer to the dress and that the last line is a coded reference to Renoir – “night yield once more,” again night, re-noir. I think it’s a bit of a stretch. Course, we’ve been assuming LizzieSiddal knows what she’s doing but maybe it’s just a really bad clue. And she won’t answer any PMs.’

Amy pulled up LizzieSiddal’s forum account. Last login was Saturday morning – a few personal messages read and the UK Treasure Hunt thread checked without commenting. The email address was standard Gmail and no other social media profiles were linked. Amy checked the IP addresses on the forum posts and ran a trace.

‘She likes to keep us guessing,’ Amy said. ‘I think you’re right about Rossetti, but I guess you’ve searched around
Fair Rosamund
?’

He only had one painting on display at the museum, the one that had so captivated Amy on her browsing. She would almost be worth a trip to the museum, to see her in the flesh.

But the thought alone set her heart racing, the thought of venturing outside covering her in a wave of sickness. She took a deep steadying breath, grounded by Jason’s hand on her shoulder, and sank her anxiety deep down.

‘Top to bottom. It’s definitely not there – unless some bastard stole it. But why not claim you found it then? And surely LizzieSiddal would check on it?’

From a quick glance at the rules, the hider was meant to maintain the integrity of the geocache, ensure that it was still findable. Of course, geocachers also took holidays, but right after they’d planted a piece in a national contest? This seemed unlikely to Amy. These people appeared to have the same obsessional interest in their hobby as she had for hers.

‘When the gallery reopens, we’ll take another pass. I have a portable metal detector.’ Amy lied easily, her low, disinterested voice difficult to suss out. Only Jason could catch her in deceit.

‘Really? All right, Ada, I can live with that.’

The promise of a gadget had won Corelia’s heart and Amy smiled at how similar they were. Though Corelia was standing in the sunshine outside her school, whereas Amy was locked down in the dark.

Amy hung up as AEON beeped the completion of LizzieSiddal’s IP trace. Amy brought up the results, a neat green dot in Cardiff town centre.

Right over the National Museum of Wales.

Something had gone wrong.

Truth had waited all night – and nothing. And no courier had come to fetch the carefully packed crate in the morning, leaving her agonising over why. How had her meticulous plan fallen to pieces?

Once more, she was left with nothing but the painted harlot, the last thing she wanted, a reminder of her permanent place in the shadows. Truth’s anger erupted like a volcano, the long-maintained façade splintering. She seized the bunch of flowers on the side table and yanked them from the vase, throwing the faded roses to the floor.

She wanted to scream, to rage, but the door was ajar, the bed’s occupant slumbering despite the noise burbling up from the corridor beyond. Truth carefully picked up every last stem and petal, mopped up the water and neatly threw them away before anyone saw.

The mask back in place. The good daughter once more.

She retook her seat by the window, folded her hands calmly in her lap. Took a deep breath. She had to remain calm, in control. Her discipline was all she had. The only chance she had to appease the forces of life and death.

It was clear that her demands were not being taken seriously. Truth was not being taken seriously. She had thought she held all the bargaining tokens, but it turned out she held nothing at all. She needed to retake control of the game, and the first step was targeting the one who had betrayed her, forced her hand to theft and murder.

Truth was not a little girl now. She was going to prove that – to everyone who would push her down, and to the mediator who would try to trick her when she should fear her. She would return to her original plan, except she would not listen to excuses this time. She was the one in control.

She took out her tablet and opened up her email, an anonymous service that guaranteed safety to political activists and women in hiding. Nothing new – no explanation, no new promises.

The bitch would respond. She would respond or she would be shown, in front of everyone, exactly what happened to those who dared to defy Truth’s wishes.

The security guard had paid the price. And so would she.

Amy ordered pizza, leaving AEON to puzzle out the riddle of the geocache. Tomorrow, Jason would go down to the museum and demand answers, but tonight was for what Amy called ‘debriefing’. Jason steeled himself for an interrogation.

‘How did you lose your helmet?’

The first question was revealing. Jason had wondered where exactly she had planted her tracking devices, and she had showed her hand there. He silently objected to being tagged like a lab rat, of course he did, but he didn’t exactly live a quiet life of knitting and bridge.

‘I had an accident,’ he began.

Amy sat on the sofa beside him with a slice of pizza halfway to her mouth as she listened in mounting horror to his story. It was easier to confess when he was sitting in front of her, presenting evidence of his wholeness, wellbeing.

‘In a lake? Where the fuck was Frieda?’

Knowing the NCA agent’s lack of sympathy would earn her negative brownie points with Amy, Jason attempted to sidestep the issue. ‘Arresting the lorry driver. I got out by myself.’

‘You could’ve died.’ Amy replaced the pizza slice in the box, her mouth twisted unhappily.

‘But I didn’t.’ He reached out to cover her wrist with his palm. ‘Just got a bit wet.’

Amy let out a shuddering breath. ‘You got to Bangor?’

‘We interrogated the driver and he was involved in … moving girls, through Wales to Ireland. He told us about this smaller operation, like a courier, between north and south. We tracked one of the guys to a pub and…’ Jason trailed off. Was there a good way to tell Amy he’d offered himself up like a sacrificial lamb?

‘You volunteered, didn’t you?’ Amy asked wearily. ‘Someone needed to put themselves in danger and that person had to be you.’

Jason thought that was a bit harsh, but it was essentially true. He had been sick of feeling like a lackey, an errand boy, pushed and pulled around for Amy and Frieda’s personal convenience. And he was in his element with boys like Jonah Fish, knew what made them tick, how to nudge at them just right to make them squeal.

He had been the man for the job. And if there was a bit of danger involved, that was no bad thing. How did you know you were alive unless you felt something?

‘I made contact,’ he said, thinking of the way Jonah had crashed into the floor, rising with a bloody nose and fear in his eyes. ‘Arranged to meet him in the evening, so I could do the run in his place.’

‘So, you spent the afternoon making arrangements,’ Amy filled in. ‘You called me.’

Jason’s tongue caught, unpleasant warmth creeping up his neck and onto his cheeks. He should tell Amy that Frieda had protested, told him not to go, railed against his choices. But that scene had ended with her … He didn’t want to tell Amy that.

He was aware that he hadn’t moved his hand, that his palm rested over her slender wrist, as she watched him with rapt attention. No computer between them, nothing except a pizza box on the table that both of them had forgotten. He had wanted to see her, across from him, in that moment and here she was.

He closed his eyes, mounted his courage, and—

‘Are you all right?’

Her concern broke the moment, her hand coming up to ghost across the bandage at his temple.

‘I’m fine,’ he said, voice steady but only just. ‘Just tired.’

‘We can finish up tomorrow.’ Amy stood, gathering up the pizza box to stuff it in the fridge, her concession to domesticity.

Jason fought for control, berating himself for being so stupid. It was the exhaustion, he told himself. Amy was off-limits, his boss, and she needed a level of careful handling that he, tactless oaf that he was, couldn’t aspire to. He needed to shake this crush before it ruined something precious between them.

‘I’m going to bed,’ he called out, slipping away before he could see her again. The air was too full of possibility, and he had to escape before his resolution failed him.

‘Should I change…?’

Amy returned to an empty living room, her assistant vanishing as if he’d never been there. For a moment, panic clawed at her throat – had she imagined him? Was he lost, alone, in need of rescue?

But, no, his empty mug was still precariously balanced on the arm of the sofa, his jacket slung over the back. He had been here. Why then had he fled for the hills?

They’d only been talking about Bangor, an innocuous retelling of his adventures in the north. She had reached yesterday afternoon in the story, a lull between the major events of the tale – why should that provoke such a reaction? Unless…

Unless something had happened that afternoon. Something he wanted to keep from her. When he had been alone with Frieda in a hotel room with nothing but time, about to part, to put himself in danger and not see her again for days.

An uncomfortable suspicion lodged itself in her stomach, the pizza threatening to make an abrupt return to the light. Had Jason and Frieda had an … encounter in North Wales, a tryst? She would be the latest in a long line of women that Jason had picked up and put down without thought, taking his pleasure and then casting them aside.

But Frieda was different, wasn’t she? A professional woman, an investigator, not a random student or girl from a bar. He had followed her to North Wales on a whim, preferring her demands over Amy’s.
What does she have that I don’t?

The answer was blindingly obvious, of course. Confidence, poise, urbanity, worldliness – and a brand new motorbike, even if it was now ruined beyond repair. Amy enjoyed a moment of spiteful joy at that fact, but it didn’t last.

He had come home to her, but for how long? When Frieda returned to Cardiff, would he beat down her hotel room door, take her in his arms and … leave for London?

The idea was preposterous. Jason Carr was Welsh, born and bred. His family were here, his mam and his sister. His friends, on the inside and out. She couldn’t imagine him in any other place or time, though his music drifted him back to the eighties, surrounded by memories of his father.

But stranger things had happened. Cerys had run with gang boys, dated notorious criminals, clawed her way through fights and set innocent property on fire for nothing but fun. And now she was training to be a police officer, dating one.

If Frieda Haas had enough power over Jason after one day to summon him to North Wales, what would she be capable of now? She would only have to click her fingers and he would come running.

What was that phrase? ‘If you love him, let him go.’

She didn’t know about love, had never tasted it, but the pain in her chest at the thought of losing him was a cut as devastating as if she’d been stabbed.

But she would let him go. He deserved better than her. She had nothing to give him except murder, and one of them deserved the chance to live free from horrors.